District 150 hires back 39 teachers

PEORIA — Thirty-nine of the 66 Peoria School District 150 teachers honorably dismissed in April will be back in classrooms in August.

Board members approved a human resources report that included rehiring the teachers during a School Board meeting Tuesday.

After the meeting, Superintendent Grenita Lathan said it was the first time in five years the district had been able to start the rehiring process before the end of the school year.

The rehired teachers were among almost 200 employees, most of them full- or part-time teachers, laid off in April. Most of the teachers were dismissed in the annual reduction-in-force, or RIF, process, caused by state law that requires school districts to give teachers 45 days’ notice of their layoff.

“We made a concerted effort to get people back as soon as possible using projected enrollments,” Lathan said, adding more rehires may occur.

The meeting, on Tuesday because of the Memorial Day holiday, was at Peoria High School. It was the last committee of the whole meeting.

Board members voted to return to a regular format with board meetings on the second and fourth Mondays. Committee of the whole meetings were originally intended as once-a-month working sessions, said board member Debbie Wolfmeyer. But they had increasingly become more like regular business meetings, causing board members and citizens to question their usefulness.

Lathan and board member Linda Butler said they thought it was important to continue the whole-committee format even if it was no longer once a month. Board members will consider other options for the meeting format — such as quarterly committee of the whole meetings or revising the public comment portion of the agenda — at the June 16 meeting.

The announcement of a plaque to be mounted in Peoria High’s wrestling room honoring Dave Kinney garnered a rare round of applause at a board meeting for a District 150 administrator. Kinney served as the district’s interim comptroller/treasurer for four years. His last day is next week. Larry Wilcockson, a former vice president of finance and administration at Northeastern Illinois University, is the new treasurer.

District 150 is gearing up for PARCC, or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, the Common-Core aligned, computerized testing that will replace the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT).

But board President Rick Cloyd’s efforts to compare District 150 to other school district’s readiness to implement PARCC didn’t seem to go as expected. To paraphrase the exchange between Cloyd and Lisa Gifford, a Roosevelt School language arts teacher and member of a statewide PARCC committee who updated the board the assessment:

Cloyd: I’ve heard 70 percent of schools in the state aren’t ready for PARCC yet. What are they going to do?

Gifford: I don’t know, I don’t work there.

Cloyd: But what would they do?

Gifford: I’d assume they would panic.

Cloyd: So we don’t have to go through all that?

Gifford: I didn’t say that.

Pam Adams can be reached at 686-3245 or padams@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter @padamspam.